To Lose a Battle (17 page)

The direct achievements of Abetz and his circle were not great; neither he nor any other German agency succeeded in creating in pre-war France any large-scale network for espionage, sabotage or subversion and compared with what the world has since come to associate with the Kremlin, all their efforts were as child’s play. But what was important about Abetz’s ‘Fifth Column’ was not what it was, but what other Frenchmen thought, and feared it, to be. Writing in 1941, Élie Bois claimed typically: ‘The traitors did not show themselves, they worked in the deepest shadow, so that the eye of justice should not surprise them. From afar they pulled the strings of puppets, some of whom did not even suspect it, while others, being aware, feigned ignorance.’ These ‘traitors’, claimed Bois, were held together ‘by a truly mystical bond’. Hitler’s cunning propaganda of bluff and double-bluff, just as it made his Army and Luftwaffe seem even more imposing than they really were, helped inflate the sinister spectre of the ‘Fifth Column’. In the last years of peace, Abetz’s work further widened the gulf between Frenchmen; in war, it was to foster belief in the presence of a vast, malignant invisible machine of agents and
‘traitors’ efficiently paralysing the French war effort at every remove. In fact France had no need of villains; she was effectively enough ‘betrayed by what is false within’.

Fall of the Popular Front

On 21 June 1937, after the Radicals had deserted him in the Senate, Léon Blum and his Government resigned. The Popular Front lay in fragments. Blum’s refusal to intervene in the Spanish Civil War (despite pressure from his Communist allies), his attempt to come to terms with the
patrons
by temporarily pegging wages, the ‘Clichy massacre’ whereby six workers had fallen to police bullets, and finally the drab failure of the Great Exhibition of 1937, had provided the nails in the Front’s coffin. Within the next fourteen months, another three Cabinets came and went in France, in what Jacques Chastenet, the French historian, describes as ‘a sombre period marking perhaps the low point of French political life under the Third Republic’.

But although the Popular Front had disintegrated, the most pernicious of the effects of the ‘civil war’ associated with it remained deeply rooted in France. First, out of the wreckage the Communist Party had emerged immeasurably strengthened, principally at the cost of the Socialists of the moderate and patriotic Blum. In 1922, while the German Communist Party numbered 218,555 members, the French totalled only 60,000. After sinking to an all-time low of 29,415 in 1931 (but polling 6·8 per cent of the electoral votes), already by January 1936 the French Party’s membership had risen to 32,000, and its slice of the nation’s votes to 12·6 per cent; but by the end of 1937 its strength had attained the fantastic figure of 340,000, making it the strongest in the Western world, an ascendancy it would long retain. Not only had the Party gained in numbers; it had also gained vastly in wisdom, tactical skill and striking power. These were factors that were to help the Party survive the rude shock of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939, and to lend weight to its assault on the national war effort during the ‘Phoney War’. Secondly, after the psychological and physical upheaval caused to French industry by the
Popular Front, its equilibrium could not be restored in time to meet the crash rearmament programme forced upon France in the wake of Munich. And thirdly, though the French Communists stood alone in opposing the Munich settlement and maintained their opposition to Hitler until the new
volte-face
of August 1939, hatred of the Party and mistrust of Russia, augmented by doubts as to her value as a potential ally, following the 1936 purges within the Red Army, inclined the French bourgeoisie more and more towards appeasement.

The Rush towards War: 1938–9

In March 1938, after two years of deceptive passivity since the reoccupation of the Rhineland, during which time his rearmament programme had gone into top gear, Hitler resumed his march of conquest by annexing Austria. At one blow, France with her static population of 42 million was confronted by a Reich of 76 million virile Germans. The powerful frontier defences of France’s principal Continental ally, Czechoslovakia, were now turned. Again Britain and France stood motionless. Hardly had Hitler begun the work of digesting Austria than he was directing his attentions against the Czechs. With ever-increasing momentum, events now swept Europe once again towards the abyss of war. President Beneš appealed to France to stand by her treaty obligations to her ally. The French Government, with Édouard Daladier once more at the helm and that slippery arch-apostle of appeasement, Georges Bonnet, at the Quai d’Orsay, represented a divided and thoroughly pacifist nation. Terrified by General Vuillemin’s recent revelations of German air strength, and doubtful that its defensively organized Army could strike effectively, and without suffering enormous losses, at the Germans protected by their ‘West Wall’, it cast about desperately for some means of evading its obligations. Salvation was granted in the shape of Neville Chamberlain, who obligingly prepared to fly to Germany to offer Hitler any sacrifice of the Czechs that might avert the unspeakable prospect of a renewed war with Germany. Nervously France watched the negotiations at Munich, the
Paris bourgeoisie already having fled the capital in their thousands, in cars with mattresses heaped high upon the roofs – a concomitant of panic that would be all too familiar eighteen months later. Then Daladier returned from Munich. Expecting to be lynched, he was astonished to find himself besieged by an enthusiastic crowd at Le Bourget. Simone de Beauvoir recalls that ‘that evening a great wave of rejoicing swept over Paris; people sang and laughed together, lovers clung together…’; while she admitted that she herself ‘was delighted, and felt not the faintest pang of conscience at my reaction. I felt I had escaped death, now and forever.’ The honest Léon Blum represented a wide range of French feeling when he said that he greeted Munich with a mixture of ‘shame and relief’. In the Chamber, only the Communists of Thorez, acting on the latest instruction from Moscow, voted solidly against the Munich sell-out.

After Munich, France’s whole inter-war strategy of alliances at Germany’s eastern rear lay in ruins. The great Skoda arms complex fell under Hitler’s control, and the bloodless surrender of the Czech ‘Maginot Line’ meant that the full weight of the Wehrmacht could now be deployed against France, if need be. But Poland was next on Hitler’s timetable. In March 1939 he occupied the rump of Czechoslovakia, in flagrant breach of the Munich agreements. Though France remained mutely pacifist, an extraordinary change of heart now swept England; enraged, she at last girded herself for war against Hitler. Chamberlain now extended his ‘guarantee’ to menaced Poland, thereby jettisoning Britain’s traditional policy of non-involvement in East European affairs, and at the same time assuming direction of the Franco-British alliance. ‘Here’, said Winston Churchill, ‘was decision at last, taken at the worst possible moment and on the least satisfactory grounds.’ France followed Britain’s lead reluctantly.

By the summer of 1939, British war production was rapidly catching up with that of Germany, and at last, desperately late, a new sense of urgency began to filter through to France’s stagnant industries. She had a long way to go. Her share of world production had fallen from 6·6 per cent in 1929 to only
4·5 per cent in 1937; because of the plunge in her birth-rate, the number of her workers had decreased, between 1932 and 1938, by nearly a million and a half; while the number of hours worked per year had fallen from 8,000 million in 1933 to 6,000 million in 1937. In that latter year, when Germany was producing 19 million tons of steel, France’s total was only 6·6 million. Although the world slump of the early 1930s had hit her far less hard than Britain, it had also hit France later, so that she was only just shaking off its effects as war approached. In November 1938, a new, energetic and fearless Minister of Finance, Paul Reynaud, assumed office. At once he challenged the French worker’s sacred inheritance from the Popular Front, the forty-hour week. ‘Do you believe,’ he asked in a broadcast, ‘that in today’s Europe France can maintain her standard of life, spend 25,000 million on armaments, and at the same time take two days off every week?’ He followed up with forty-two decrees largely repudiating the Popular Front’s reforms, and reinstating a forty-eight-hour week. On 30 November a twenty-four-hour strike, Communist-inspired, gripped France in protest against Reynaud’s fiats. But the protest was a failure, and a remarkable new vitality began to make itself felt throughout the French economy. Unemployment fell rapidly, and in 1939 French productivity rose 17 per cent compared with the previous year. Would France, however, be granted enough time to set her own house in order?

In June 1939 Britain and France opened negotiations at the Kremlin in a desperate bid to put teeth into the Polish guarantee by gaining a Russian commitment. With misgiving (‘I must confess to the most profound distrust of Russia,’ Chamberlain had declared that March) and almost incredible dilatoriness on the part of the Western powers, the talks dragged on through the summer. Marshal Voroshilov, the principal Soviet negotiator, stated that his Government had a ‘complete plan, with figures’ for co-operating over Poland; but what about the others? The British and French delegates had to admit they had neither a plan, nor plenipotentiary powers even to discuss one. All propositions had to be passed back to their respective governments. How many British divisions might be available
for dispatch to France? asked Voroshilov. Five infantry and one motorized, came the reply. Blandly, Voroshilov declared that the U.S.S.R. would be ready to put into the field against an aggressor 120 infantry and 16 cavalry divisions, 5,000 heavy and medium cannon, and about 10,000 armoured vehicles. Then what about Poland, the subject of the Allied guarantee? Obstinately, Colonel Beck’s Government declined to permit entry into Poland of the Red Army under any pretext. ‘With the Germans we risk losing our liberty,’ Marshal Smigly-Rydz told the French Ambassador in Warsaw, ‘but with the Russians we would lose our souls.’ As post-war events have shown, his fears were not entirely ill-founded.

In Paris, that last summer season of 1939 passed with a particularly frenzied brilliance. The official receptions all seemed to have a note of unreality about them, but nothing quite rivalled the July ball held at the Polish Embassy. It appeared as if the women had all been invited for their beauty as much as for their distinction, and the Ambassador, Lukasiewicz, excited the admiration of Paris by leading his staff, barefooted, in a polonaise until three in the morning across the lawn of the Embassy. The dancers were macabrely illuminated by red Bengal lights, and one spectator could visualize Poland herself being consumed in front of his eyes, ‘
courageuse et légère, en danses, en fumée
…’ Ten days later came the last
Quatorze Juillet
, an echo full of the splendid panoply of a past age: Foreign Legionnaires, Senegalese,
cuirassiers
in shining breastplates – and a detachment of British Grenadier Guards in scarlet tunics and bearskins to reassure Frenchmen as to the reality of the Entente. But there was little that offered encouragement for the immediate future. How the facts of life had changed since that
jour de gloire
of just twenty years ago!

Meanwhile, in Moscow the Russians had become exasperated by Polish intransigence and Franco-British temporizing, and were finally convinced that the Allies’ object was to involve the U.S.S.R. in a war in which she could expect little or no support from them. On 17 August the talks ground to a halt; but already three days earlier Ribbentrop and Molotov were in negotiation together. On 23 August the shattering news that
Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, those apparently irreconcilable foes, had signed a pact of non-aggression. It was a crushing defeat for Anglo-French diplomacy, though at this distance it is difficult to see that this had left Russia any alternative. If Britain stuck to her guarantee to Poland, war seemed inevitable. The Pact sealed the fate of Poland, and for that matter of France too, because now the only military ally she could count on in the East was the valiant but antiquated Polish Army. As Paul Reynaud wrote later, ‘The Allies had lost the game’ – but he might well have added ‘set and match’ as well. France, on holiday, was utterly stupefied by the news of the Russian
volte-face
, which caught even the Communists momentarily off balance, though
L’Humanité
hastened to interpret it as a move of ‘peace’. The full moral effects of the shock upon France would only later become felt. In Berlin, William Shirer noted that the Germans were quite bowled over by Hitler’s latest and most astonishing
coup.
At one blow the German nightmare of a war on two fronts seemed to have been removed. Surely, whatever now happened to Poland, France and Britain would not dare intervene?

On 28 August, Shirer reported Berliners watching ‘troops pouring through the city towards the east. They were being transported in moving vans, grocery trucks and every sort of vehicle that could be scraped up.’ Three days later, the world heard that the German Army had attacked Poland without warning. On 3 September, a stricken Chamberlain announced that Britain was fulfilling her guarantee to the unhappy Poles. In a France desperately disinclined to ‘die for Danzig’, and even more mindful than Britain of the unreplaced dead of 1914–18, Bonnet still tried to skate upon the slippery ice of appeasement, replying to the outraged protests of Ambassador Lukasiewicz: ‘You don’t expect us to have a massacre of women and children in Paris…’ But the game was up, and France too found herself in the war she had dreaded for so long, with no allies but Britain and Poland, Belgium neutral and the Maginot Line incomplete between Longwy and the sea, her Army strong on paper but weak in fact, her Air Force hopelessly outclassed, and the nation divided.

Chapter 5